lono cfn lifecyle commands. The nice thing about the lono cfn lifecycle commands is that it will automatically call lono generate so you never forget.

Standalone installer: https://www.boltops.com/toolbelt — This handles installing all the dependencies for you like ruby. Gem installation is still available for those who prefer it.

Details

Let’s cover the updates in a little more detailed now.

Official documentation site

The old documentation was pretty much the README before. As lono’s features grew the README got quite long and became overwhelming for new users. Most of the documentation has now been moved to the official documentation site and the README provides a nice quick start summary for users. I hope the lono documentation site provides a useful resource for everyone!

Improved Error Stack Traces

I honestly have no idea how lono lived so long without this major improvement. Before when you made a syntax error in a lono ERB template, the stack trace would look something like this:

I know, that stack trace hurts the eyes so much that it possibly makes them painfully bleed, resulting in you rushing to call for an ambulance and getting professional medical help; that costs a small fortune. Fortunately, with the new version of lono you do not have to worry about this specific scenario with your eyes as much. Here’s an example stack trace with the same error:

The output is even colorizes so you can clearly where the error is 😁 Huge thanks to Matt Galloway for helping me implement this feature.

YAML Support

AWS CloudFormation officially introduced support for writing your template in YAML format in September 19, 2016. It sadly took me 8 months to add YAML support. Best reason I can give you: kids.

At first, I was actually not used to writing the templates in YAML but I’m getting fairly used to it now. I also use these commands to convert from JSON to YAML and vice versa.

Sometimes it is useful to go back to JSON so I can use Stephen’s lovely jq tool.

Lono Param Generation

Writing parameter files in AWS official format is a bit verbose. I can completely understand why AWS has chosen to use such a verbose format due to it’s flexibility, but for most cases a simpler format perfectly suffices. Here’s the concise format:

Convenient Standalone Installer

Lono is dependent on a newer versions of a ruby installation on your system. This is an extra step for some folks and is a barrier to trying it out. Lono is included in the bolts toolbelt which allows you install lono without dealing with it’s dependencies. All it takes is a single command: